The World According to "Aaarrgh!"

For the past several years, I have been proud to consider as a friend and a client Mukesh Shah, a successful businessman in Tulsa.  A couple of weeks before Christmas, Mu asked me to visit his house to give him some engineering advice regarding some retaining wall and drainage issues, as he wanted to downsize from a two-story to a ranch and needed to get his house ship-shape before putting it on the market.  I spent the morning with Mu, giving him pointers and engineering advice.  A week later, right before Christmas, I gave him a copy of a plan for a retaining wall and drainage system that I had used on a similar house in Texas.  He was very excited that day, as he was planning on leaving for Egypt with his wife and children the next day.

I received a call from his daughter today asking me exactly what I had discussed with her father.  I must have sounded very puzzled.

“You don’t know that my father died, do you?”

I was blown away.  Here was someone that I had established both a professional and personal relationship with, and now he was dead.  I asked if he had died while in Egypt.  No, he died before they left.  He had had a heart attack and dropped dead not long after I had talked to him and he had told me about how excited he was about his trip.

Sometimes we don’t appreciate life and those people who are part of our lives enough.  I felt profoundly sad when I hung up the phone.  I was sad because I had lost a friend; I was also sad because I didn’t even know about it until a random phone call a month later.

Goodbye, Mu.  You will be missed by many.

An easy divorce?  That’s something that exists in the land of unicorns and magic dragons.  I guess if one of the parties drops dead or disappears into the Amazon jungle it can be easy, but barring some extreme act of Fate, such a thing doesn’t exist.  As long as you have two people who disagreed enough to get a divorce, you will have two people that will still disagree with each other after the divorce.

My wife, for example, is still having to contend with actions that occurred when she was married to the other fellow, and that was over 4 years ago.  He wrote some bad checks, and since they couldn’t find him, and he and my wife were married at the time, they came after her, because he did the bad deed before the ink was dry on the divorce decree.  My ex and I have spent the better part of two years now disagreeing about what debt is hers, what is mine, what is both of ours, who pays what, why, when, and how.  Of course, because we cannot agree, we have to go to a third party, the courts, to help settle it for us.   Meanwhile, while we have to set aside funds for legal costs, we also have to live and pay our day-to-day bills while we wait and see what the ultimate resolution is.  These back debts, then, have been stick in limbo until the entire mess is sorted out.

Most of these creditors have been very decent and understanding about the situation.  After all, it is kind of hard to know what to pay if you don’t even know if you have to pay, and neither of us can afford to pay for things that we need not have to pay for.   Once creditor, however, has not been decent at all, and has been very obnoxious and demanding.  Out of the blue I received a call from this creditor several months again demanding payment – NOW!  As this is the newest of the bills being only a couple months old, I was a little annoyed.  After all, I explained, there have been creditors patiently waiting for the better part of two years to get their money, and they were the first in line and should get paid first.  Being nice, I said to give me all of the information and I would bring it up in court to see who should pay it, when it should be paid, and how it should be paid.  Being nice was a big mistake.  That was the end of September, and the court wasn’t ready to hear about in October, so the next opportunity is in January.

At the end of October, I got the official court documents that said that the unpaid bills were one of the issues that would be settled later, and explained that since neither my ex nor I would know what the court decides until it decides, that neither one of us can pay it off until that judgment is rendered.  The creditor wasn’t happy because that meant that money would not be paid NOW, but seemed to understand.  Seemed, being the appropriate modifier.

The week of Thanksgiving, this creditor once again called me and demanded payment NOW, that they didn’t give a damn what the court had said or was going to say, that one of us ws going to pay NOW or else!  I was furious.  This was someone that over the years my ex had given over $4000 to, and now this person was going to threaten us with collections over a paltry $200?  I stated to this person that I didn’t appreciate being bullied and extorted, that it is mind boggling that someone would throw away thousands of dollars of future business for such a paltry sum, a sum that represented less than 5 percent of the total that we had given to this person.  I was told that this money was desperately needed to keep the business afloat.  I’m sorry, but it is a pretty poor business person that gets in such a spot that $200 will make or break them.

Subsequent to that conversation, I heard from a third party that this particular business owner has a reputation of being a bully and suing people for pittances.  I have also heard about the extravagances and unnecessary expenditures, both in the business and in this person’s personal life.

Yesterday, I received a letter from a collection agency demanding payment.  I called the collection agency, and discovered that my ex had received one, too.  So, who owes it?  If we both pay it, then wouldn’t we be double paying?  I explained to the very nice representative the situation, that this particular debt was waiting on a decision by the court, which wouldn’t be for another month, at least.  No problem, I was told, they will wait.  Which makes sense, really, because if we both paid then we will have grossly overpaid and the collection agency could be sued for collecting funds that were not owed, and no collection agency wants to have to go to court.  It’s a hard job, and why make it more complicated?

So, we have a business owner who decided to be a bully.  Because of this – this person will not get their money any quicker than if they had waited for the court to render a decision; this person has now forever poison a business relationship that is worth thousands of dollars; this person has now made an enemy who vows to get the word out and start a boycott.  And for what?  A paltry 200 bucks.

The credit counselors will tell you that to boost your credit score, you should always make sure that the balance on your credit cards is less than one-half of you total credit available. So, being someone who wants to maintain a good credit score, I have endeavored to do just that. After all, no one wants a bad credit score, right?

My reward for my efforts? A reduction in my credit line. Out of the blue I received a call from my credit card company telling me they were reducing my available credit. Now, suddenly, instead of being below that magic 50% number, I am almost maxed out on my card, as they pretty much lopped off all of my available credit. I went from almost $2000 available credit to $300. I was rather ticked. I asked the reason for the credit reduction? My debt to credit ratio was too high. The irony is that it wasn’t too high until they reduced my credit line. Talked about a circular argument – the action they took was justified by the action they took. In other words, if they hadn’t reduced my credit line, then my debt to credit ratio wouldn’t be bad enough to justify reducing my credit line.

Why do I think they did it? I think it’s because I didn’t spend all of the money available, and credit card companies make their money off of interest, and the more you spend, the more interest you pay. They even told me that they never reduce your credit line below what you have on the card, so if I would have maxed out the card, I wouldn’t have reduced my credit line.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!